Tonight at midnight millions of Americans will queue up at movie theaters bearing tickets to be among the first to see the most anticipated movie of the season, The Hunger Games. According to online-ticketing company Fandango, the film is already accounting for 92% of its daily sales, and has surpassed the first Twilight film's pre-sales numbers. My colleague Dorothy Pomerantz reported yesterday that the growing line has already earned The Hunger Games a cool $8 million

But what will that line look like, I wonder, for a movie based on a book intended for teens but gobbled up by adults across the country?

Harry Medved, a spokesperson for Fandango, couldn’t tell me ages, but did mention that they’re seeing a “much more even-handed demographic split” of males to females for Hunger Games than they have for previous teen winners. Nielsen also says they don’t track book sales by age, but anecdotal (read: Facebook) research tells me that more than 50% of my own friends have plans to hit the theaters this weekend.

Yesterday the New York Timesspoke to 39-year-old Brie Rosen who stood in line for hours outside a Barnes and Noble waiting for a glimpse of the cast. What’s more, according to lexicalist, an online demographic dictionary of modern American English, more than 30% of the usage of the phrase “Hunger Games” is by adults between the ages of 18 and 34. For the 12-17 category, that number drops by half.

Hunger Games, based on the popular book series by Suzanne Collins (who also co-wrote the script), is expected to continue breaking records, with an anticipated opening weekend that spans from the official estimate of $85 million to the rumored—and much higher-- $140 million said to be swirling in Hollywood circles. Lions Gate, who owns the movie, is banking that the series will continue to rival the teen-centric Harry Potter series, which brought in more than $7 billion worldwide. But with a dystopian storyline involving the graphic carnage of teen-on-teen violence some critics posit The Hunger Games may be simply too dark to be a financial hit in its intended demographic of children 12 and up.

A fair point: pundits and policy-makers are still reeling over the film’s PG-13 rating, saying the level of violence warranted a much stricter R, which would have kept those under 17 out of the theater except with parental supervision. But I’d wager those critics are not considering the powerful, deep-pocketed, and, not to mention adult, demographic who will be driving ticket sales this weekend.

I’m not surprised at all. Here’s why:

The book has long been a hit with older audiences

The buzz for Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games hit book publishers like a fever in 2008. Agents were staying up all night reading proofs and they knew--just knew--that this one would be a hit, not just with the intended teen audience of 12 and up, but among much older readers. In June, three months before the first printing hit shelves, Publisher’s Weekly wrote:

The Hunger Games is set in a dystopian North America (called Panem) in which 12 districts must each send a boy and girl between the ages of 12 and 18 to compete in televised mortal combat--reality TV at its deadliest. Although Collins's Underland books also have violent scenes, the author believes that the nature of the conflict in the new trilogy marks it for older readers. “There's no fantasy element,” Collins told PW. “The violence is not only human on human, it's kid on kid. I think that automatically moves you into an older age range.”

Two years later, New York Times writer Pamela Paul proudly told readers that she found herself “barreling through The Hunger Games at the hospital after giving birth to my third child, I hardly noticed whether he ate or slept.” These are books for teenagers, she wrote, “I am well into my 30s.” David Levithan, editorial director at Scholastic and Suzanne Collins’s publisher told Paul that roughly half of the “Hunger Games” fans on Facebook were “full-fledged adults.”